Seapegasus Blog

Java, linguistics, scifi, steampunk, games

Check out the current Space Engineers gameplay in the dev build from September 2015!

You’ll see a large player-made ship with a great looking interior and functional components. The game supports modding, which means that players can download the sources and add and share new content! The ship approaches a planet — planets are the new feature that was added. Since this space ship isn’t aerodynamic, some of the decorational pieces and landing gear is “torn to shreds” by the physics simulation. :-o

The player manages to land the ship impressively well with the remaining landing gears, although he forgot to switch off the ship’s gravity generator. :-P After a (ho-hum) minor elevator accident he gets out of the airlock and onto the planet surface. The development version of the planet doesn’t have any content other than soil, grass, trees, and mushrooms, but minable resources will surely be added. (I notice the current version doesn’t have any bodies of water yet, either.)

Since you can’t have a Space Engineers video without “a large explosion that can be seen from space!”, he proceeds to crash the test ship into the test planet… Which looks spectacular and leaves an appropriate crater in the voxel planet. Somehow, the poor astronaut gets catapulted into the air. Next he downloads a cool scifi buggy from the Steam Workshop, and drives around on the planet surface a bit.

If you don’t know Space Engineers yet, the video also shows you how creative building works in the game. All ships and vehicles and space stations in this game are custom-made out of functional components with physical properties! Despite the growing lag (too much debris nearby?), he builds a working Miner, and proceeds to drill straight down into the planet. Nice! Planetary mining works surprisingly well already, the dev build is just lacking ores. Be aware that this game is a physics simulation, so every time your Miner collides with the sides of the cave, it will be damaged, and you have to you repair it — or it falls apart.

This is going to be great, you will be able to build planet-side settlements, supported by orbital factories, military space fleets, and asteroid miners… We can play “king of the hill”, coop, or conquest tournaments in multi-player… Every player can bring in their custom designs and compete to see which one is most robust… :-)